


Silver

by OmegaZeta5



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Drama, Drama & Romance, Edeleth, F/F, F/M, Humor, Intrigue, Male My Unit | Byleth, More Relationships to be added, Mystery, Not A Fix-It, Politics, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Retelling, Romance, Slow Burn, Violence, in some places
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29989968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OmegaZeta5/pseuds/OmegaZeta5
Summary: "Stay away from the Church of Seiros."Byleth never knew why his father had been so adamant on that. Standing here, between the pews with the moonlight almost silver through the pebbled glass panes above, he thought he might never know why. Not even when he was here, at long last. Garreg Mach Monastery, the place with all the cards, all the answers. All the secrets. And he had the whole year to dig them all up.He looked around the cathedral. Sorry dad, he was thinking. Guess I just couldn’t help myself, this time. I’m sure you’d grill me if you could.A lone mercenary lands himself a job as a Knight at Garreg Mach Monastery: a place where everyone's after something, and whatever it is, they want it before anyone can figure out they're after anything at all.
Relationships: Catherine/Shamir Nevrand, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Marianne von Edmund, Edelgard von Hresvelg/My Unit | Byleth, Hilda Valentine Goneril/Claude von Riegan
Kudos: 22





	Silver

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy oh boy. Writing this fic is such a blast, I tell ya what  
> This was supposed to be just a simple rewrite of another longfic I'd had posted(that'll never see the light of day again), but it's sort of turned into something else, now. That's fine, more than fine, actually, it really is a _blast_ I can't stress that enough haha  
> It's called Silver, but I wouldn't call it a Silver Snow adaptation. Really I wouldn't call it an adaptation of any one route, I'm sort of lifting elements from everything here, meshing them all together, seeing if they're working out. It all came out of this one question I've been asking myself for years, "What if Byleth didn't teach any of the classes", which other fic writers have tackled to amazing effect, so I suppose this is just my take on that intriguing concept!  
> Hope you enjoy!

One early morning on the Tailtean Plains, a woman walked across a battlefield, killed a king, and watched the sunrise with her mother.

She has never experienced a dawn like that since.

* * *

It was a monastery without a heartbeat.

The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the birds had. A spattering of sparrows, like scarlet flickers in the purple sky. It was a cold and fresh morning, the kind that usher in parades or coronations, celebrations or festivals. An electric buzz in the air from the few students who were up already, pulling themselves together in their dorms or tiptoeing across dew-kissed grass to try and snag a quick breakfast in the dining hall. A quiet thrum of a being slowly waking, but still it lacked a proper heartbeat. 

Because the bells hadn’t rung yet. 

◆◈◆

At the top of the highest tower stood a woman who did not know why she kept forgetting to pray.

She's been here many times, of course—these were the chambers granted to her as Archbishop. She's known such quarters for longer than most people have known their own lives. And she's spent many moons and many dawns in this exact spot, out on her balcony and overlooking the monastery heights. Normally it's to conduct her evening and morning prayers. To wish good tidings to those below. To give thanks to those above. To beg forgiveness for herself. 

But when she woke up this morning, on any of the mornings this past week, the rites had failed her. The words had fled her. She didn't know why. And to a clergywoman as devout as her, an impulse like this was a sign. But a sign of what? What was this sinking she felt in her gut as of late whenever the sun rose, this ache in her chest? Where had she felt this before, and why did she feel it now? 

They were questions made of glass. Hollow and see-through. Because the mystery behind her hurt was no mystery at all—the start of a new year always brought old memories back to the surface. The kind that made prayers like hers feel all the more futile. 

She tried to put it out of her mind, then. Because they were the thoughts of Rhea, the musings of a woman, not the Archbishop, and to put the needs of the former ahead of the latter was unacceptable. Unforgivable. The latter was what the monastery needed. 

It was what those below needed, and it's what she'd given them no matter how much they'd taken from her. 

◆◈◆

In the monastery library, just one floor beneath the Archbishop's chambers, was a man who meant to kill her before the year was over. 

He could not do it alone, of course. He could not do it anytime soon. He had the assets he needed and all the time to place them in their proper spots for his master's eventual siege of what he deemed such a filthy place. Because when he looked around this monastery he saw almost nothing but lies. Still, he did not hate it. In those lies lay opportunities. 

Tomas was not his name but it was what he was known as. He was not a librarian but it was what granted him such close access to his target. He was not human, but he saw all those around him as something less so. And dwelling in that library, sorting books into their correct shelves from students who'd been too antsy to do so themselves, he thought how wonderful a thing it was to be surrounded by so much prey. 

◆◈◆

In one of the Academy classrooms, a house leader stood alone with her professor. His stare was cold and lifeless. Hers was burning.

"This will be the first time we've taken the class out on the field," she said. 

He didn't answer. He just stared. This only made her glare burn harsher. 

"I need your word that you won't lay a hand on our students during ventures such as this," she continued. "Do I have it?" 

When he answered, his tone was the same as his eyes. "Yes." 

She shook her head, stood defiant with her arms crossed. "I said do I have your word?" 

Jeritza looked at her more pointedly. "You have my word, Lady Edelgard." 

Edelgard stepped back, looked him over. She judged the honesty of his words and figured they had to suffice for now—she did not have much choice, otherwise. And despite her own misgivings, she wanted to trust him. Because he was one of few people she could, in a monastery as dangerous as this. 

"Sun's rising," she said, turning away. "It's almost time." 

◆◈◆

Someone who’d never been here before stood on a stone courtyard. He saw the racks of training weapons, some wooden, some blunted iron, he saw the columns supporting an open roof he felt served a solid tactical advantage in a siege should one arise, but most of all he saw the space he had to work with. A bird chirped in the air high above and he followed the sound. He looked up with river-blue eyes and watched the faint golden glow that signified the start of something new. A day with unknown quantities. A year filled with strangers. A place he’d need to get a good feel for if he was ever going to get the type of answers he needed. 

The type he wouldn’t be able to live without.

Then Byleth looked back to the training grounds he stood in. To the swords and the lances and the racks and racks of gleaming armor, the smell of oil and iron. And he thought, alright. This was the stage he’d been given. His domain. This was something he could do.

He waited. Nothing in the courtyard changed. Nothing in his eyes changed. He raised a small brow and when he spoke it was with the low smooth timber of someone who picked his words very carefully.

“You're a little quiet, today." 

He was completely alone. He waited for a response all the same. A faint whisper. One that sometimes came, sometimes didn't. 'Sometimes' couldn't hope to be never. And he'd discovered a long time ago that it wasn't something he was imagining. 

He stood there, waiting, thinking. What would he hear now? 

Then the bells rang, and Garreg Mach came to life.

◆◈◆

A girl rapped her knuckles on a door hard enough to make them sting. “I know you’re in there,” she said. “You’re never up this early.”

Silence. Ingrid glared through the varnished wood. This marked her third attempt, just this morning. By now she’d usually have kicked the door down and dragged its occupant out smirking, possibly laughing, and she’d have shook him by the shoulders and riddled him on where he’d been the night prior and who he’d been with, but they were in a different sort of place now. They were in Garreg Mach, and she couldn’t well act the way she normally did with her friends. Not yet, at least.

Still nothing. She rapped the door again. “Sylvain,” she growled, “for the _last time_ ,-”

The door swung back. Sylvain’s uniform was as messy as his hair. “Morning.” He grinned. 

Ingrid did not. “Get dressed, we’re moving out now.”

“Now, huh?” Sylvain rubbed the back of his head, still grinning, “What day’s it again?”

“Sunday.”

He blinked slowly. “We don’t have classes on Sunday.” 

“We don’t.” Ingrid sniffed. His breath held a light touch of alcohol, and there was another fragrance wafting from his clothes as well. 

“What is that?”

A twinkle of recognition passed over Sylvain, and Ingrid didn’t need to hear his response then to know the scent belonged to a woman’s. She sighed. 

“Get dressed, or we’ll both be late.”

It took a bit more force to get Sylvain to finally do what was asked of him. Ingrid stood guard outside his door, watching the sun creep higher over the peaks of the Oghma Mountain range, and she wondered for the first time today just why she kept the kind of company she did. The first promise she’d had him made when they arrived here was that he wouldn’t carry over his antics from back home, and now look how she found him. They were hardly a moon into the school year, for Goddess's sake. Maybe she ought to have kicked his door in after all, monastery be damned. 

The sun rose ever higher. They were going to be late for sure.

◆◈◆

Hilda laid in her bed, the covers twisted tight in her fists, and she wished more than ever before that the sun would just go away.

She was not a morning person. She didn’t care to label herself as any sort of person, really—labels were for students with the energy to keep them. She’d tried to make her peace with that as the school year began, and her peers at least knew well enough to steer clear from the utter mess that was Morning Hilda. She thought they were real sweethearts for that. She couldn’t really say the same of the faculty, of her professor who was already threatening to dock her grade on account of frequent tardiness. She could just see him now, old man Hanneman with his beard and his frown and his lectures on what it meant to be a student attending this Academy. 

But this was a special sort of school, wasn’t it? Weren’t they supposed to be more accommodating to their guests, more ‘spiritually-minded’ as the monks so often put it? 

Nevermind that each student got their own chambers, commoner and noble alike, and nevermind that their meals were free and they were undergoing the best education Church gold could buy. For a girl like Hilda, mornings like these, where the sun was barely up and the rays made her wilt under the blankets as she did now, her hair a mess and her room even moreso, they were the most awful raptures she’d ever witnessed. 

So she thought it was very unfortunate that Garreg Mach happened to be a morning sort of school. If someone were to tell her that most schools operating in Fodlan did, in fact, start their curriculum in the mornings, she may have actually cried.

At least the beds were soft. 

◆◈◆

Linhardt didn’t know where they were going. That wasn’t quite true—he knew where his classmates were taking him, he just wished he weren’t going anywhere. He often did, and he often expressed these wishes very clearly. A boy like Caspar would never mind such wishes even if it meant the difference between life and death. 

“Where do you think they’ll put me? Be honest, now.”

Linhardt blinked blearily. It was cold but the sun made his uniform feel stuffy. “I honestly don’t know,” he said.

“Duh,” Caspar laughed, throwing an arm around his shoulder, “course I know that! I’m asking where you think Edelgard’ll put me!”

Linhardt had stiffened in that way a teenager who spent more time in the library than he did on the field often does. He mulled over the topic for a moment. What sort of response would get a boy like Caspar off him? What did he want to hear? 

Linhardt cleared his throat. “On the front lines,” he muttered, and waited to be set free.

“Really?” Caspar grinned and shook Linhardt by the shoulder until his eyes rattled in his head. “Man, I sure hope so!” 

Life and death. Linhardt felt very much like the latter now, as his class bumped and brushed him along on their way to a day’s worth of activities that didn’t include sleeping. 

◆◈◆

The last place Flayn wanted to be was here, cooped up in Seteth’s study when there was so much to see today. She’d read all his books her first week here, and she’d even enjoyed a few of them. ‘ _The Ruminations on Saint Crestology’_ drew a few laughs from her in particular. But Seteth was not a man known for light reading material, and when that’s the only sort of entertainment one usually finds in a study, it made sense for someone like Flayn to try and leave it every chance she could. She hadn’t regretted those ventures, not even when Seteth sighed and looked like he might pop an ulcer on the spot. 

She regretted them very much right now, as she stared wistfully out the window and saw the boys and girls in Academy uniforms hustle and bustle their way off the monastery grounds, to the assignment they were to carry out for this moon. The same assignment Flayn was barred from seeing. 

She watched them go, on and on. Flayn didn’t know any of their names. She didn’t know many names of many things at all, really. She wanted more than anything to learn every single one before the year ended.

There was so much to see today. On all days. There was a whole world out there worth seeing.

◆◈◆

It quickly became a warmer day than'd been expected for the mock-battle. The Lions were not prepared for it.

Dimitri could see it in their eyes, the way they carried themselves as they set up shop on their side of the quarry: the sun was high in the sky now, glinting off the surrounding limestone and glittering the tree leaves. It was bright and it was hot and it sucked the wind from their sails a little. The other two classes would not hold this sort of disadvantage; they were not from the north. 

Thankfully his professor wasn't either. 

"Rise and shine, darlings," Manuela said, "it's only going to get warmer from here on out." 

She was answered by a few cheers, a few groans. Annette was fanning herself and Felix held everyone and everything under an even frostier glare than usual. Sylvain was hung-over and Ingrid was steaming. They were not a class prepared for a task like this, on this morning. 

Dimitri stepped forward and the groans all dissipated at once. He had to keep from frowning a little at that. A prince like him often felt such happenings were the result of his position rather than his character, and a man like him often felt that was just so unfortunate. So when he smiled to his peers he poured all the honesty and heart he could into the act. So that they knew how sincerely he believed his next words: 

"It's going to get warmer, yes. Lend me your strength, and we will not need to linger out here for much longer." 

◆◈◆

One of the Deer was missing.

"Anyone seen Hilda?" Claude glanced around his classmates and none of them held answers in their eyes. None of the woods they'd hidden themselves in did, either. "Anyone." 

Lorenz cleared his throat and in the time it took him to prepare his words Ignatz was already stammering. "I, ah. I don't think she remembers what today was." 

Claude frowned. "Oh yeah? Why?" 

"...It's Hilda." 

Hanneman blubbered and scoffed the way he usually did. Claude puffed out a lungful of air. "Yeah, that sounds about right." 

"I told her a dozen times," Lysithea muttered, crouched behind a bush and glowering, "a _dozen_ times." 

"Alright," Claude said, trying to grin, "alright! So we're down a member, that's fine. We've just gotta plan our way around this."

Leonie wiped down her bowstring, frowning. "How do you suggest we do that?"

Claude said, "We improvise," but really he was wondering the exact same thing. That didn't bother him as much as it might others. 

He had a knack for improvising. 

◆◈◆

Byleth has never been here before. Still, he knew an evaluation when he saw one. He'd seen and fought in them since before he could count his own fingers. 

The Knights had positioned themselves on an outcropping with a perfect view of the quarry below. Byleth could see everything on the field, the shrubbery pocketing the dried grass, the run-down shed in the top left corner and even the abandoned fort on the shed's opposite. The Blue Lions to the south, the Black Eagles to the north. It'd taken Byleth a bit of squinting to find the Golden Deer but they were in there, hidden in the thicket near the west. 

Above them all was a monastery perched amongst the rising peaks of a mountain range that'd stood there long before any of them had, and would continue to stand there long after the monastery itself was destroyed.

Behind Byleth, two Knights were wagering.

"Five on the Kingdom kids," Catherine said, "they win every year, they'll do it again." 

"Negative," Shamir said, "the Deer hold the element of surprise, here." 

Catherine grinned. "Afraid I have to represent my home team."

"Afraid that's five gold pieces out of your pocket." 

"Please." Catherine turned. "You, new guy. What do you think?" 

Byleth didn't look at them. He didn't have to; he knew an evaluation when he heard one. Instead he kept on looking out to the quarry below, at all the classes getting ready for a battle that wasn't a battle, with weapons that weren't weapons on a field that wasn't a field. Because to Byleth a field was something filled with iron and steel, blood and sweat, partners and brothers. 

Fathers. Byleth hadn't been on such a field in some time.

So he studied the teams at play. He gauged each ones' odds of success based on the parameters he'd been given. And when he looked back at the women, he spoke in that low and smooth timber. 

"I think you're both wrong."

◆◈◆

"This battle boils down to two main objectives," Edelgard said, pacing back and forth before her class, "you tag a house leader or their professor, they're done. Your house leader or professor gets tagged, you're done. There are no two rules in this mission more important than these. Any questions?"

No one was missing. No one was hungover. No one said a single word. Edelgard nodded with a gaze that was as cold as it was calculating. 

"Good. Let's get to work." 

◆◈◆

Seteth had been so busy eying the newcomer he'd almost forgotten to blow the starting whistle. It was hard not to be suspicious, though—the students come under fire from bandits during a training exercise, bandits who knew where they'd be that morning and more precisely _which_ students would be there, and in swoops this lone mercenary, saves them all without a bruise or gash to his name, and the only recompense he asks for is...a job? It didn't add up to Seteth. Nothing about Byleth did. He wouldn't even give a last name. Seteth didn’t know which was worse, the fact that Byleth was actually considered a member of the Knights now, honorary or otherwise, or the fact he’d be spending so much time around the students as their combat instructor. It was an omen grave and terrible amongst omens. At least he hadn’t made for Professor.

Right, Seteth thought. The starting whistle. He brought it to his lips. A sharp note echoed through the quarry. 

And the games began. 


End file.
